Friday, December 25, 2015

Development status

With the coming holidays, I thought I'd give you an update on the state of the game and the reason behind the delays.

For the TL;DR people: mainly funding problems. For the rest of you, keep on reading.

AC-130 GS:SOS is a project that was funded with my own -very limited-
life savings after coming out of a somehow nasty personal situation. I
expected the project to take somewhere around 6 to 8 months working
full-time, which meant available funds where just enough to scrape by till the end of the project.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, the project grew in a way that I
hadn't planned. I didn't want to have mindless bots just moving
aimlessly around a map waiting to be killed - I wanted a smart AI that
would react realistically to a living battlefield. I wanted them to
fight each other, have real missions, a purpose. I wanted vehicles that
would use their full capabilities, both in attack and evasion. I wanted
injuries and bleeding. I wanted a realistic damage model that would
disable vehicle parts independently instead of "this tank can take 5
shots before exploding in a generic way". I wanted a crew that would
analyze and make fitting comments about the situation developing
underneath.

And that all takes additional time. Time means food and rent, and those two mean funding.

Normally, developers turn to Crowdfunding once they see funds are not
enough to realistically finish a project. Unfortunately I did not have
that luxury: in my country, operations in foreign currency were
forbidden, and even if they hadn’t, taxes and transfer fees would’ve
eaten almost all of the funds, if not more than what was actually
collected. To overcome that barrier, developers in my country actually
set up their companies abroad, but in my case, I just didn’t have the
money to pay for the process.

Come June this year -10 months into
the project- the funding situation was dire, to the point that even if
the game had been completed right then and there, I wouldn’t have had
enough funds to set up the structure necessary to post it on an app
market and start generating revenue.

Therefore, I had no choice but
to look for ways to make a living that would allow me to keep working on
the game at least part-time, which meant that in the last 5 months, the
project hardly advanced as I concentrated on that.

Nowadays, while
still in hot waters, the situation is a lot more stable, which means I
can –slowly- keep working toward a finished game. As it is, the game is currently about 70% finished, with a pretty clear roadmap encompassing all remaining requirements.

I want to both thank and apologize to all those who’ve been eagerly
awaiting this game, and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
hoping that in the next one I finally get to reward you with a finished
and entertaining game.